She wore the most luxurious fashions of the 1980s. Her face is the envy of millions. So when Famke Janssen was cast as Xenia Onatopp, the new “Bond Girl” of the 1990s in the James Bond thriller, “GoldenEye” (1995), it was front-page news in The Hollywood Reporter. When the movie premiered, she was interviewed everywhere, and her name was added to wish lists all over Hollywood.
Janssen began modeling at a young age and was immediately successful in her native Holland. When work for Chanel brought her to NYC, she stayed. Still young for a model (not yet 25), she quit to study creative writing and literature at Columbia University and enrolled in an acting workshop. Having appeared in an episode of Fox’s campy night-time soap “Melrose Place”, Janssen landed her first significant role as Jeff Goldblum’s romantic interest in “Fathers and Sons” (both 1992). She followed that up playing the action lead in the TV-movie “Model By Day” (Fox, 1994), a role she is said to want to forget. The multilingual actress co-starred with Scott Bakula in Clive Barker’s “Lord of Illusions” (1995) before hitting screens in her breakthrough role as the villainous Russian killer who crushes men to death with her thighs in “GoldenEye.â€
